Letters from Lisa

As a teacher of young children, I’m often in the position of trying to get basically playful, distractible, silly creatures to be serious. It’s tiring sometimes, reminding them to sit up in their chairs, get right to work when an assignment is given, and avoid making silly remarks that will hijack the class’s attention away from what they’re doing. I occasionally feel like a mean person for stifling conversations and jokes that seem like good fun, but I’m doing the kids a big disservice if I don’t impress upon them the need to focus on what they’re doing with serious, undivided attention. I’ve got 45 minutes with each class, twice a week, but by the time they get in the door and make trips to the bathroom and finish an argument that got started on line on the way down and settle down enough to realize that I’m saying things they need to hear, that 45 minutes has dwindled down to 40, or if the class is late, 35. Then I have them for about ten minutes before someone has to leave for their speech therapy appointment, and someone else comes waltzing in (usually loudly) from an appointment that’s just finished, and of course has no idea what we’re doing. This has the effect, often, of resetting the class so that we lose our focus and any memory of what we’ve been doing for the past several minutes, and we have to start all over again. Then, if I’m lucky, the phone will stay quiet, the loudspeaker will stay off, the copier won’t churn out 17 pages of reading homework that five different people have to come in and collect, the fire drill will be postponed, the squirrel outside the window won’t do a backflip off the fence (it’s happened) and it won’t start raining thunderously or, God forbid, snowing.

Generally, it helps when the kids are in a serious frame of mind. This doesn’t mean joyless, or fearful, or robotic - just serious. The other day I was doing a lesson about fruit and seeds that involved cutting open some fruit and looking inside. Granted, it was the last period of the day, just a few days before vacation, but there were a few who stepped over the line and ruined the experience for the entire class. After about the tenth yelled out comment about killing and blood and fruit guts and smashing the fruit’s brain in, I’d about had it. I was tempted to go sit at my desk and make a nice salad with the fruit, rather than continue to listen to the comedy routine. (I settled for giving the offenders warnings about being asked to leave if they continued, and for giving their homeroom teacher a less-than-stellar report when she arrived to collect them.) This particular class frequently has a hard time getting serious. Their counterparts in the classroom next door, however, loved the fruit lesson. They were smiling and laughing and commenting, talking over each other and sometimes over me, but their comments were things like, “Wow, look how many seeds there are!” and “Some of them are white and some of them are brown!” and “This will make a lot of new fruit trees when we plant them!”

Science is a great subject to teach. Almost anything can become an experiment, and almost any experiment can be enormous fun. The trick is to find the right balance between playfulness and seriousness. Kids who veer too far to the silliness extreme often don’t pay attention to directions and warnings, and therefore end up sabotaging their experiments and not getting the results they wanted. Which ends up being no fun at all. Sometimes they escalate into being even sillier, to play off the embarrassment of making a mistake, and sometimes they pick a fight with the kid next to them who “made” them mess it up. If I can get them to be more serious in the first place, and avoid all of that, I’ll do it.

On the other hand, sometimes there is such a thing as being too serious. Sometimes we study things that can’t be experimented with directly, such as oil spills and space and archaeological digs, so we have to create models in the classroom that in some way correspond to the actual real world experience. During our unit on floating and sinking, we created a mini oil spill in a plastic container, with feathers to represent birds and rocks on one side to represent the coastline. The kids observed how the oil floated on top of the water, therefore not affecting the “animals” we’d put on the bottom, but quickly coated the “bird”’s feathers and wouldn’t wash off. It was all going great, with kids making comments relating it to a slideshow I’d done for them about real life oil spills, when one kid blurted out, “I don’t get it. How is this science? We’re just playing with toys.”

The other kids, who’d been enjoying the simulation, looked stricken. It was like he had just told them there was no Santa Claus. I asked him, a bit more anger showing in my voice than I would have liked, whether he wanted us to create a real oil spill in the ocean, or if it would be OK if we just did it in a box. We continued with the session, but everyone left feeling a little bit dissatisfied. He got the idea well enough, but seemingly thought that what we were doing wasn’t Serious enough.

Just today, I was doing a session with an older group of students about archaeology. I’m going to be showing them my South America pictures tomorrow, and they’re going to be spending the next several months learning about ancient cultures. It would certainly help them to get a feel for how all that information in the books was generated. First we had them pretend to be archaeologists from 4,000 years into the future, examining artifacts from their homes and school. They had to guess whose items were whose, and draw conclusions about what the items “represented”. Then, for session 2, we prepared a “dig” for them. We buried seeds and “artifacts” and built “residences” and “temples” in layers of soil and sand for them to excavate. Even though there wasn’t anything more flashy in the boxes than a little pyrite and an arrowhead, they had a great time with it. They especially enjoyed dusting their sites off with little paintbrushes (I wish I’d had that kind of patience when I was actually dusting off bones at Ccotocotuyoc) and many of them shouted their findings out to the class, even when it wasn’t anything more exciting than a pile of rocks or a piece of sea glass.

Of course, there was one kid who just didn’t get it. I couldn’t tell at first if he didn’t understand the idea of it, since he kept insisting that they should pull everything out of the box and build something with the rocks they found. Then it seemed that he thought some of the rocks were part of a building, and other rocks were just randomly placed. But then it turned out that he just didn’t get the point of playing along. “It’s not a building anyway,” he said to his shocked classmates. “They’re just rocks! The teacher put them there!”

One of them fired back: “You’re supposed to be imagining that this is an ancient culture and you’re learning about them! Of course they’re just rocks. You have to pretend!” In other words - lighten up! Be a little playful! I told him that I would have preferred to take him on a real archaeological dig rather than do a pretend dig in a plastic box, but we would have to settle for using a model. The ironic thing is, earlier in the morning, his reading group had read a page about meteors and then “launched” their own “meteors” into a box filled with flour to see what size craters were made. I didn’t hear him complaining that they were “just rocks” then. I’m willing to entertain the possibility that meteors are more exciting than excavating a site - or that his faculties of imagination and playfulness were exhausted from the meteors and just weren’t available to our archaeologial dig.

So there it is - the real secret to being a student. Adjusting the amount of seriousness and playfulness until it’s just right. And as a teacher, helping children regulate what they are bringing to each task and concept so that it’s the ideal balance for what we’re doing. Easier said than done.

On Friday night I clocked out of school after 9 pm. It wasn’t because I was writing lesson plans, though I did sit at the computer and work on next week’s stuff while I was eating my dinner. (I was also emptying millipedes, pillbugs, cricket nymphs, and mealworms into our new terrarium. Don’t ask.) It was because our high school put on its musical, and I wanted to see some kids in it who were once in my classes.

Five years ago, when I was a first year assistant and the kids in question were in 5th grade, the school started a Friday clubs program for the last period of the day. The thinking was that no deep learning is going to take place during the late afternoon on a Friday anyway, so we might as well do something fun and relaxing with the kids, get them to socialize outside their classes, and relieve the need for teachers to stress themselves out about “getting work done”. For better and worse, the idea has stuck. The first few years, we did sessions for the first half and then second half of the year, so that kids got a second chance to get their first choice. We now do three a year, with kids guaranteed to get one of their first choices sometime, though not necessarily right away (otherwise there’d be 75 kids in cooking club and 3 in board games).

That first year, a parent very generously donated a semester of Young Playwrights, so we had an outside person come in and do sessions with the kids who’d signed up. I was assigned to help out. The group was small, and many of them really would rather act out scenes than sit and write them. The girl from Young Playwrights was very good - she had worked with my mainstream fifth graders when I was a student teacher at another school - and eventually found her way with the kids who struggled with language and writing. Still, there wasn’t enough interest to keep paying for her to come back.

Just as the first club session was wrapping up, my reading group and I decided to write a play ourselves. We had just finished up a book and needed a final project to demonstrate what we’d learned from it. So we put together a script, backdrops, and a playbill. (The playbill was my sneaky way of getting kids to write summaries about the book.) We did the show in the teacher’s lounge, with so many classes packed into the audience on the floor that their teachers had to step out. The kids spoke too quietly and the book’s plot was lost on much of the audience, but it was a good first effort, one that I’ve repeated many times with subsequent reading groups.

One of the kids in the group had wanted to make the show into a musical. She was obsessed with Broadway musicals and really wanted to sing. I told her it wasn’t a good idea for a reading group, since our focus was on reading out loud, not singing, and some of the kids in the group probably wouldn’t want to sing anyway. She mulled it over for a few days, then announced that she wanted to do a musical during clubs instead - Oklahoma! - and that she already knew who’d be perfect for each part. She’d asked her favorite gym teacher to play opposite her as the lead role. I laughed, told her to slow down and get permission from the principal, and that we would put together a staff of teachers who would adapt the script, direct the show, and most importantly, make the casting decisions.

It was the beginning of February when we convened - 19 kids, 4 teachers, and a few months to pull a huge production together. I conducted rehearsals in a large classroom, while the music teacher pulled kids for singing sessions at recess. We started scheduling extra rehearsals as soon as we realized just what we were up against - there was never enough time, kids forgot their lines from Friday to Friday, and we missed a whole string of rehearsals for special events like concerts and holidays. I began to panic. As the countdown grew shorter, I started staying for music rehearsals, and I couldn’t believe how good the kids sounded - especially the girl who’d started it all, who turned out to have an amazing singing voice. I began to relax. Then I began to panic again, realizing that we still as yet had no set. (Keep in mind, I was teaching all of my regular classes and going to graduate school while we were doing this.) The art teacher stayed until 7 pm the night before dress rehearsal painting the backdrop. I saw it for the first time the next morning - beautiful and professional looking, of course. The kids were distracted by it at first, but by performance day, they’d (sort of) gotten used to it. On the morning of the show, the music teacher was late, and I freaked out thinking that I would have to take over at the piano. What if my hands shook? Luckily, he arrived before the audience got too restless, and we did it. The whole experience was chaotic, haphazard, overwhelming, and a huge success.

We’ve been victims of that original success ever since. The show got a huge response from the audience - most of it due to the fantastic set, probably - and the principal came up and announced that we would be continuing the musical theater club next year, starting in September and open to all kids in the elementary school, not just the upper grades. The music teacher left, so I took over the piano playing (mostly to avoid a repeat of that frantic ten minutes when I thought I’d have to play songs I didn’t know in front of a full auditorium). We’ve done one show every year since, all with the same basic challenges of time and space and missed Fridays, and all with huge groups of kids. This year we’ve got 38 kids involved, which is our second largest group ever, after the Alice in Wonderland production, which had 48. (And this is a school where there are only 12 kids in a class!)

We’re about to hit our fifth anniversary this year. We’ve left behind “doing musicals” and we’re now writing our own - in a way, going back to the original idea of having a playwriting class. There isn’t a day goes by that I’m not stopped in the hallway by one of my theater kids, who’s got some new great idea for a scene or has a question about the costumes. Which makes me think that even if my original student hadn’t pushed for the musical to happen, it might have happened eventually anyway. These kids are absolutely determined to be onstage. It’s odd that clubs was originally conceived as a fun, relaxing, and low-key thing for kids to do during a “wasted period” on Friday afternoon - and here we are, putting together the single most ambitious, time consuming, and concentration-requiring project that these kids will work on in their elementary school careers.

And what of my original 19? Most of them are in middle school now, and a few are freshmen in high school. Several of them were in the production last night. Most of them have continued to do the musicals every year, which guarantees that I’m going to be at school late watching them for many years to come. It’s become one of my favorite things about being a teacher.

Why I Give My Kid Medication from Soapy Water. Great post - highly recommended reading.

As a curriculum coordinator, I look at a lot of books. Some of them are for me, to learn more about the subject matter that various classes are studying, and some of them are texts for the teachers to share with children. And before I launch my diatribe, I do have to say that for a society that purportedly doesn’t read and doesn’t know or care anything about other countries, there are a lot of great resources out there about history and culture. Sure, it helps to be studying medieval castles or Egyptian mummies or pirates (three subjects that, if archaeologists ever excavate the children’s section of a bookstore, they will think formed the basis of our state religion, possibly along with dragons and wizards) but there are materials out there about many things. I’ve been moderately successful in tracking down books about the great so-called “New World” civilizations - the Maya, Aztecs, and Incas. This isn’t nearly as popular a topic as it should be (aside from Mel Gibson’s movie, which is about the Maya in about the same way that the Da Vinci Code is about Christianity) but still, there are books.

What they have to say is a different story.

We’re past the days in which you would find quaint-sounding, overtly biased text about Indians in children’s books. I’ve seen older series about explorers that talk about the “accomplishments” of murderers like Francisco Pizarro, Hernan Cortes, and everyone’s favorite politically incorrect antihero, Christopher Columbus. But these days, that’s becoming rare too. Not that it doesn’t take determination, guts, quick thinking, and great faith to sail across a huge ocean into the great unknown and rob and enslave thousands of people for your own personal financial gain. But I digress.

No, the issue that I have with many of these children’s books is the subtler biases, stuff that most people, and certainly most children, wouldn’t pick up on consciously. In a way, that’s worse. Take the passage I happened across today, from a story about Hiram Bingham, who “discovered” the “lost city” of Machu Picchu (with the help of native guides who knew it was there all along). It went something like this: “Obviously the people who built this magical city above the clouds were master craftsmen. But how did they do it? They didn’t have modern tools or technology. They hadn’t even discovered the wheel.”

That one line - “They hadn’t even discovered the wheel” - was like a slap in the face. In six words, the author has managed to belittle Inca technology and make them sound like cavemen, and in the guise of expressing appreciation for the achievement. I’m sure it wasn’t purposefully done, but it manages to sound condescending without even trying. No, the Incas didn’t have wheels. Even if they’d had them, who knows if they would have used them. It doesn’t make any sense to use wheels up in the mountains. One wrong step, and they go rolling back down taking your huge stone with them, probably crushing you and your entire work crew in the process.

In any case, they didn’t have wheels. They also didn’t have written language, iron tools, or other things that we generally assume are needed in order to engineer the sort of amazing things that they were very obviously capable of. This probably says more about our own limited imaginations than about anything else. We’re like the kids today who can’t imagine a time when people lived without cell phones or email. There’s a line in our theater script, spoken by a father: “When I was your age, we didn’t even have computers!” The girl who says that line recently asked me if that was really true, if people really didn’t have computers “back then”. It’s natural to experience a gulf between one’s own experience and that of previous generations - especially where technological development is involved.

But in the case of other civilizations, we are not only dealing with time and technology bias, but with racial and ethnic bias as well. For too long, other civilizations, conquered civilizations, have been dismissed as primitive, godless, unknowing, needing to be enlightened. And that’s why “They didn’t even discover the wheel” sounds so wrong. It’s the incredulousness of it, and the way it compares one civilization to another. “This may look like a cool stone city, engineered perfectly high up in the mountains,” it seems to say, “but at least WE figured out how to use wheels.”

Many sources about Mesoamerican and South American civilizations mention the differences in technology, communication, and so on without sounding condescending or biased in any way. In this case, I think the problem is that the language has been oversimplified so that children can read it. It’s hard to write historical text that is conversational enough for school-age children without sounding silly, redundant, simplistic or outright biased.

Historical reality is messy. It’s mired down in personal perspective and political posturing, often going back for centuries. In the case of a conquered civilization like the Incas, on the one hand we have almost disbelief that a European power could have even conquered them - hence a sort of self-congratulatory wonder in some of the accounts of the conquest, and an emphasis on the richness of the plunder so that others will commit to the same cause - but on the other hand it would obviously look bad to murder and pillage a great civilization, hence there are ways to make them sound savage. Even the chroniclers who were sympathetic to them were there to convert them. No observer is a blank slate. There are countless decisions made - what to include in the books, what to leave out, what to emphasize or de-emphasize, what not to even notice because it doesn’t make sense according to our own expectations.

And as a school, we make these decisions too. We make decisions all the time about what to discuss, what to show pictures of, what’s not age appropriate, what’s on topic and what’s a tangent. How to give kids the essence of something without getting completely bogged down? It’s complicated stuff, what we’re asking them to learn about. And complicated is fine. It’s what allows people to spend their whole lives studying history and culture, and why there are thousands of books about the same topics. I like to conceptualize history as gossip - people whispering to each other about who did what to whom, who’s in and who’s out of favor, who’s following the latest fashion, who’s the real power behind the power…

Some of the better sources for kids capture this feeling, and emphasize the way that the information was gathered rather than “just the facts”, which are rarely “just” anything. It’s really too bad that so many sources for kids make everything sound so simplistic. I think things are changing, but slowly. Children’s books need to make a major change if they’re going to really do it right. It’s almost as though they have to go back and… reinvent the wheel.

Aside from a few friends that I am close with to this day, I didn’t go to school with many people who really ‘got’ me. In grade school I was teased and ostracized, from a combination of severe social awkwardness and bumbling on the school’s part. Their refusal to get involved when I was bullied or shunned was one aspect. Another was the fact that I did not have a reading group (during the years that reading is the main focus of the school day) and frequently was left to sit in the back of the room reading by myself. Teachers mostly liked me because I was smart and good with adults, but every once in a while they felt obligated to cut me down in front of the class, to prove to me that I didn’t know everything. They got particularly mad when I tried to help other kids, such as by giving a hint with spelling a word - as though it was classified information that only the teacher was allowed to provide. (And no, it wasn’t during a spelling test. Though it might have helped my social status a little bit if I’d been willing to help kids cheat.) This ensured, in case any kid had doubts, that I was always perceived as separate and different. Just because you are in the same room with other kids doesn’t mean you are included, either instructionally or socially.

I would not have minded quite so much that I didn’t have many friends at my school if everyone would have just left me alone. Some kids did. Others thought it was fun to get a reaction out of me, so they said things to make me cry, stole my things and taunted me to try to get them back, got other kids in on the act so that there would be an audience. It never got very serious except for the one time that things got out of hand and I almost got trampled on the schoolbus, prompting an older kid to yell at the offenders: “How would you like it if that was your little sister?” I wasn’t used to being defended. It still makes me feel ashamed to think about that incident.

On the other hand, I always preferred the clear cut, outright instances of bullying to the subtle digs that the “nicer” kids slipped in. At least it was honest to kick my lunch box or call me “Fishface” or tell me that I had a big nose. It was direct. And if a teacher happened to see it, it was easy to resolve. It’s much harder to prove that kids are giving you dirty looks, rolling their eyes when you speak, deliberately turning their backs or making sure that you don’t have room to sit down, or ceasing all conversation as soon as you walk up to them, because whatever they’re sayinig is definitely not for your ears. It’s so easy to dismiss those little moments of cruelty. As a not-liked kid, I heard every excuse in the book, and often my teachers took them at face value. “I wasn’t ignoring her, I just didn’t hear her.” “We were saving a seat for so-and-so.” “I wasn’t even looking at her.” “We weren’t talking about anything.” Teachers didn’t feel comfortable forcing kids to be “nice” to each other, particularly when they were asked to intervene in ambiguous situations or the behavior was minor. They may have even felt sympathetic towards my classmates. Since I was put in a position of looking for pity and charity, it was easy enough to see me as inferior, as not being worthy of others’ time.

I was thinking about this recently because I have been catching kids in the act of being casually cruel to one another, and I have been overstepping my bounds and saying things to them when they aren’t in my class and, in some cases, are not my students at all. For example, when a kid says something silly or makes a mistake in front of the class, other kids feel free to laugh at them. When kids get in trouble and the teacher tells them to stop, other kids feel the need to jump in and go, “Yeah! Stop talking!” and compound the negative attention. I put two kids together to work as partners for an experiment, and one girl slumped backward in her chair and rolled her eyes skyward when she found out who her partner was. I told her how hurtful that would have felt to me, and made her apologize. One year I had a kid who was particularly skilled at getting others riled up. He turned to a classmate who was excited about finally being able to come up with the right answer for something that had been hard for him, and said, “You didn’t really get that, the teacher helped you.” He also tried to use playdates at his house and his birthday parties as weapons to get other kids to fall in line behind him. For example, “If you’re friends with _______ then you can’t come over to my house.” Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t enough of a King Bee to sustain this (some kids are) and kids began to turn against him.

One time it happened when a kid mispronounced a word. Even though everyone else in the class was also in speech and language therapy, and in fact in a school for kids with language impairments, they all laughed. I happened to be in the back of the room, preparing something for my own classes, and without even looking up or facing them I said, “Guys. Do NOT laugh at the way other people talk.” The room fell silent. No one even bothered to argue. They all knew it was wrong. They were just waiting to see if anyone would call them on it.

The thing is, they were a basically nice group of kids. They were just being allowed to indulge in little moments of cruelty. Not only was it hurting the child who was the brunt of it, but ultimately it was hurting them. Making them into nastier, uglier people. That isn’t what school is supposed to be about.

I know I can’t stop every little incident between kids, and that sometimes kids can and do handle things for themselves. But I won’t be a silent witness to it, the way that my teachers were for me. I won’t tolerate the eye rolling, nasty looks, poking, unfriendly teasing, or laughing at mistakes. Hopefully that will help the kids to learn not to tolerate it either.

I love quiet weekend mornings, so full of possibility and yet without the obligation to rush around making something of it.

Seems like a great opportunity to catch you up on what’s been going around here, starting with our trip to visit my sister in Oregon and ski in Utah. (No photos from my visit with Chris, unfortunately.)

Here we are on the sunny streets of Portland with my sister (seated), her fiance (hiding), his parents, and my mom (the blond one). I look like Clifford the Big Red Dog in that silly ski jacket. Anyway…

My sister and her cat, Satsuma, in her Corvallis apartment.

After visiting my sister and Chris for a few days, my parents and I flew on to Salt Lake City, Utah to ski. Here I am on our balcony at the Inn at Snowbird. In case you’re wondering - yes, it was warmer there during the day than in New York City.

Here’s the Inn, where we stayed. Everything there is concrete there - to withstand avalanches.

Possibly the best thing about skiing in Utah (besides the skiing) is the scenery. Snowbird and several other ski areas are located in a national forest, and we were fortunate in that it snowed heavily there just before we arrived.

My mother didn’t ski, and from these photos, you’d think I didn’t, either. I don’t have any pictures of myself doing anything more athletic than standing around. I guess I am exercising my facial muscles in this one. But those are skis under my heavily mittened hand. I did ski. I have the bruises to prove it.

Here I am with someone else who skiied - my dad. He went way further up the mountain than I did. So he got to experience the lovely thin air at 11,000 feet, and I didn’t. I probably would have felt OK - I got used to high altitudes during my Peru/Ecuador travels last summer.

Snowbird is a very difficult mountain, and here we are looking at some advanced trails. The building on the right is a cafe, and the people swarming around it are all in my way. (It was really hard to walk around - besides all the ice on the ground, and the crowds, my ski boots fit very poorly and I hated wearing them.) You can’t see it, but there is a fairly flat path that can be skied down to get to the easier lifts. That’s the only one I used while skiing there.

After a few days we decided to take the bus over to Alta, a nearby ski area with much more manageable trails. Here’s one of the lifts. Notice that there aren’t tons of people swarming around it - yet.

OK, this scene is a little more typical. If you’re really bored, you can play “Where’s Waldo” and find me in the picture. (Hint: Clifford.)

We didn’t ski on our last morning there because of a significant snowstorm. Instead, we packed off to the airport. Let the Delta Airlines Misadventures begin.

Here’s the view from the airport window. We had a lot of time to look at it. Many many hours. We arrived very early, for starters. Then the airline, which had been erroneously listing our flight as “On Time” all day, suddenly announced that the aircraft had been delayed in Colorado and would be late. Then they switched our gate. Then the flight was even later. Then the aircraft arrived. Then it had mechanical problems and they tried to find another aircraft. (Which they should have been doing earlier.) Then they canceled the flight and rebooked everyone so that they would all miss their connecting flights. We eventually got on a later flight on standby, though for a while it looked like they had seats only for my mother and me, not my dad. My sister and Graham had driven up from Corvallis to meet us in Portland to spend one last night together. As it turned out, we spent midnight together - then we had to get up superearly to get on another flight to take us home.

Yeah, this weekend’s looking pretty relaxing in comparison.